The City of Washington recently won four honors at the Greenville Safety Awards Banquet last week.

The awards are given by the North Carolina Department of Labor for the 2013 reporting year. NCDOL recognizes private and public employers in the state that achieve and maintain excellent safety records.

Bill Lurvey, Washington’s risk manager, fills out applications yearly for the NCDOL honors. He has to go through the numbers to figure out if the departments qualify for the awards.

Every year, Washington competes against the City of Greenville, Potashcorp, Coca-Cola and many other companies and municipalities of different sizes.

“I need to give a lot of the credit to everybody for striving for employee safety,” Lurvey said. “Every employee goes through an employee-safety program and we have done really well on promoting safety.”

Public works for streets and sanitation, along with the water resources team, won gold awards.

Adding to its awards mantel, Public Works for buildings and grounds won a second gold award.

Only five businesses won a fourth consecutive gold award — one of which was parks and recreation department in Washington.

The most consecutive awards won was by Fire-Rescue-EMS.  It was the fifth straight year the department has won the gold honor. There have been just four other companies to win it for five straight years.

“Safety is a high-priority for us,” said Robbie Rose, Washington Fire Chief, “Day in and day out we are in dangerous situations, whether it’s a fire or a wreck. We have safety equipment for all of our Fire-Rescue-EMS workers.”

Lurvey added, “When the fire department recently responded to the church fire, nobody got hurt and the credit goes to the employees for staying safe.”